Robin Good: Tools for Kids to Curate Content on New Topics

Here’s a short first-hand report highlighting how an 8th grade social studies class teacher (Terri Inloes) has fully leveraged the content curation potential to let her students dive, discover and make sense of topics (in this case social reform movements) that they had not studied before. All by themselves.

Here the steps taken to make this happen:

a) By using the Question Formulation Technique, the teacher prepared pairs of photographs representing each of the reform movements, one picture dating back to the late 19th century, and another representing where that social reform movement stands in today’s society.

b) After checking out all of the photos, students settled on the pair of pictures that most caught their interest.

c) They brainstormed and refined a set of specific questions, and then shared their thinking with the class.

d) With the feedback received they selected the topic which they would curate.

e) At this point students planned their research strategies. By using 5 different graphic organizers from the book Q Tasks, by Carol Koechlin and Sandi Zwaan, students were allowed to choose the one that they thought would help them the most in planning their keyword search strategies.

f) Students were assigned WordPress blogs and provided basic instructions on how to use them to curate and publish their research work.

g) Discovery and real learning kicked in as students proceeded in collaborative groups to research and document their chosen topic.

You can see some of the outcomes that this assignment produced right here: